Propelling Standards-based Sharing and Reuse in Instructional Modeling Communities: The Open Graphical Learning Modeler (OpenGLM)

There are several standards and specifications to formally describe instructional models, e.g. IMS LD or SCORM. One promise of using standardized descriptions is to make produced artifacts interoperable. While this works in theory, there are few tools available that support practitioner communities in creating, sharing and reusing instructional models based on existing standards. As a contribution to the authoring perspective, we present in this paper the conceptual underpinning and the implementation of an IMS LD authoring tool called Open GLM. This tool exploits existing web and learning technology standards to support practitioners in working with instructional models and related educational resources in the context of a large open repository. The paper demonstrates that the use cases relevant to an instructional modeling community-of-practice can be supported by integrating a set of complementary standards and technologies in an instructional modeling tool like Open GLM. The main future challenge to be tackled is to propel the adoption of these technologies.